The law authorized vast new powers
for the federal government to investigate, arrest and
generally snoop into the private lives of alleged
terrorists. Many congressmen who voted for it
never bothered (or managed) to read the law through,
and just how much power it gives the leviathan state
over its citizens is still unclear.

Nevertheless, the Bush
administration now wants to expand it.

Not surprisingly, a good many
people on the political left have
objected to the new legislation, which is
considerably less fetchingly known simply as the
Domestic Security Enhancement Act, but perhaps more
surprisingly, so have several on the political
right—among them former Rep. Bob Barr, the
American Conservative Union, [Click for
Video of ACU, ACLU, and
Eagle Forum panel] and Phyllis Schlafly's
Eagle Forum, among others. (The neo-conservative
Likudniks and their
pet puppies at ex-conservative organs like
National Review are conspicuous by their silence.)

The general conservative
objection, voiced by Mr. Barr, is that the bill is
simply one more titanic expansion of government power.
"Already, government investigative powers have been
dramatically expanded," the former Georgia
congressman told the press. "Already, intelligence is
working under the flawed premise that to get the bad
guys you need to spy unmercifully on the good guys."

Mr. Barr's words are almost a
definition of the system of government I have
called"anarcho-tyranny": a combination of
anarchy (in which legitimate government
functions—like spying on the bad guys or punishing real
criminals—are not performed) and tyranny (in which
government performs illegitimate functions—like spying
on the good guys or criminalizing innocent conduct like
gun ownership and
political dissent).

The result of anarcho-tyranny is
that government swells in power,
criminals are not controlled, and law-abiding
citizens wind up being
repressed by the state and
attacked by thugs.

Yet some conservatives are fully
on board with granting the government all the power it
wants.
Senator Orrin Hatch, for instance, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, is all for extending the
original Patriot Act by making its provisions
permanent. The act as passed contains a provision
that would terminate it in 2005. Mr. Hatch wants to
amend the law by removing that clause and thereby
perpetuate the Patriot Act.

Defenders of the act and the new
proposals argue that the government needs them to fight
terrorism, and certainly there are
terrorists out there to fight. Critics, including
the ACLU, say the definition of terrorism in the new law
would cover various non-violent
political dissenters, right and left.

But what nobody seems to grasp is
that the only terrorism we really have to fear comes
from our refusal to
control immigration.

The terrorism is most likely to
come from the Middle East, yet the government has done
absolutely nothing since the attacks to reduce
immigration and not much to control
illegal crossings of the
borders. There have been some efforts to crack down
on the latter, but the number of illegals entering the
country is as high now as it was before the attacks.

There is no name, let alone a
clever acronym, for the system of government that now
seems to be evolving, in which we ignore the major and
most obvious threat to national and internal
security—the
sieve-like border, through which virtually any
criminal or crackpot on the planet can pass—and instead
start restricting the constitutional liberties of
American citizens.

But it's clearly one more
installment of anarcho-tyranny—in this case, the anarchy
comes from thugs who are immigrant criminals and
terrorists, while the tyranny comes from the usual
suspect—the federal government.

Aside from some very radical
alterations in our foreign policy, which has merely
created enemies out of friendly or neutral Arabs, the
single most effective measure the government could take
against terrorist threats inside this country is to halt
all immigration at once,
throw out the illegal aliens who are here, and take
a harder look at a good many immigrants who may have
come here legally but for purposes not exactly pacific.

Yet in the year and a half that
has passed since the Sept. 11
attacks, there has been not the slightest indication
that the government has even considered that elementary
step or plans to.

Instead, it prefers to erode the
freedom of Americans while aliens, terrorist or not,
cross the border freely.

It makes you wonder which is the
bigger threat to our lives and our liberties—foreign
terrorists or our own government.

[Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,
America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture, is now available
from
Americans For Immigration Control.]